Chapter 2
A comment from Daliah Fenn, Brooklyn
I worked the front desk of the vetting firm that took the contract, and I am going to say this once and then I am going to stop saying it, because I have a family and I like my life.
The order on Anna Carter came in on a Thursday morning in July, to the night line, which the day staff were not supposed to answer and I did. I know because I logged it. That was my job. I logged intake, I assigned the runner, and I put the order in the book. I remember the client because the client did not give a name, and the money came through an entity I had never seen before and never saw again, and the request was one line:
Full background. Nine years. Child included. Priority highest. Today.
And here is the thing I have never been able to put down.
We had that file done by four in the afternoon. It was clean. It was beautiful. Birth certificate, social, leases, tax filings, a marriage record, a death record, pediatric records, a library card from a branch in Framingham. Every single reference answered on the first call. Every single employer confirmed in one attempt.
In three years at that desk I never saw a file like that. Real people have a landlord with a complaint. Real people have a dentist bill in collections. Real people have a cousin who does not return calls.
When I handed it up, my supervisor read it twice and then said something I did not understand at the time.
He said, “Somebody built this for us.”
I asked him what he meant. He said, “This is not a background. This is a costume.”
And then he told me to close the file and not to think about it again.
I have thought about it for two years.
Because a costume is made by someone, and it is made for someone. Whoever built that file knew exactly what a careful buyer would check, and made sure every question would be answered on the first call. You do not do that for a woman who mops floors. You do that for a woman who needs to be looked at, and passed, for as long as it takes.
So the question I cannot answer — the one that keeps me up — is not who ordered it.
It is who built it, and what they needed it to hold up until.
May you like
Because it did come back clean. It came back too clean.
And the man who bought it paid for it anyway.
